Moving Windows 8 To HTML5 And Javascript Is The Right Thing To Do

Hearing that Windows 8 would use HTML5 and JavaScript for its new immersive applications was, therefore, more than a little disturbing to Windows developers. Such a switch means discarding two decades of knowledge and expertise of Windows development-and countless hours spent learning Microsoft’s latest-and-greatest technology-and perhaps just as importantly, it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools.

Despite developer complaints, this is the right thing to do. Technology changes, and Microsoft has to make this shift with everyone else. It’s better for the user, better for the business, and better for everyone involved in the long run.

From a business and technical perspective, this makes sense. Windows 8 will run on a bunch of different hardware — traditional Intel x86 chips, new Intel systems-on-a-chip, and at least four different flavors of ARM. Programming separately for each of these platforms is complicated — it would require developers to recompile their code for each platform, and perhaps rewrite portions that don’t work.

HTML5 and Javascript are Web standards, and they’re built to be cross-platform.

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That not only makes their past experience less useful, but also opens development to an army of Web-focused developers who have never been particularly interested in Microsoft. Suddenly all these young hotshot Web jockeys will be able to write competitive Windows programs? That’s a lot to bear for the guy who spent a decade perfecting C#.

It could mean truly cross-platform applications (i.e. get rid of Flex). It’ll take a while to build tools that will catchup to Visual Studio. But in the meantime, more developers will be able to develop for the platform, and it’ll bring more (and possibly more usable) applications to Windows.

That’s a bad thing?

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